A Texas teenager is suing her parents to stop them from making her have an abortion. Attorneys with The Center for Defense of Life have filed suit on behalf of the 16-year-old expectant mom who says her parents are trying to force her to have an abortion of a baby she wants to keep.
The teenager is two months pregnant, according to a local television station report, and asking a judge to stop her parents from making her have an abortion by coercing her with verbal and physical threats and by harassment.
As KTRK-TV reports:
In the lawsuit, the teen claims her mom “…invited the paternal grandparents to a bar for further discussion, where she suggested that she might slip [the teen] an abortion pill through deception.”
We asked KTRK legal analyst Joel Androphy to weigh in on this case.
“Her parents cannot force her to have an abortion,” Androphy said. “If the parents force an abortion on a minor, the parents can not only be subject to civil responsibility, but they can also be criminally liable under our fetal homicide laws, because not only does the minor have a right to be protected, but the fetus does, even under Texas law.”
On a different occasion, the pregnant teen claims her dad told her “he was going to take her to have an abortion and that the decision was his, end of story.”
The girl claims her parents already removed her phone, kept her from school and took her car as punishment for failing to get an abortion.
We spoke to the teen’s father who claims the allegations are false. He says he believes someone is putting his daughter up to this lawsuit and had no further comment about the case.
Responding to the case, Mark Crutcher, president of the Texas-based pro-life group Life Dynamics, told LifeNews this kind of pressure eon teenagers to have abortions is common.
Crutcher has created a “FORCE FORM” to help pregnancy centers and pro-lifers protect women against forced abortions and he said this form has been used successfully on many occasions. In addition, Life Dynamics has produced a report called “Under-the-Radar Violence in the Conflict Over Abortion,” which details the ways women are murdered who refuse to submit to an abortion.
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This isn’t the first time a Texas teenager fought her parents over pressure to have an abortion.
Last year, a 14-year-old girl in Corpus Christi, TX, received a temporary restraining order to stop her family from forcing her to get an abortion. A state district judge appointed an attorney for the teen and extended the restraining order.
Stephen Casey, an attorney for the Austin organization Texas Center for Defense of Life, said family members who appeared in court told the judge the teenage girl was mentally unstable and incapable of caring for a baby.
Casey claims the girl’s cousin is guilty of ”assaulting her by grabbing her by the neck, hitting her across the jaw and threatening to beat her if she did not get an abortion.”
